Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

I know I keep saying this but it absolutely floors me the degree to which it feels like we’ve slipped sideways into a similar but also entirely separate timeline. Pre-pandemic feels like another world.

Fundamental assumptions about how we go about daily life have been upended. Like I said earlier, we now experience time differently. We already lived in a state of rapidly intensifying atemporality but now it’s on steroids. The past is gone; the present and future are meshed.

If you live in the epicenters of regional outbreaks it’s probably becoming more and more difficult to imagine a world apart from that. Those of us in places that haven’t yet been hit hard have a hard time conceiving of what life in those epicenters is like.

In places like where I live everything still *looks* largely the same. But in hospitals here it’s slowly changing. Hospitals are like pocket universes in and of themselves, slowly bleeding outward.

I’ve never felt so intensely that I’m living in a science fictional world, except I’ve also never encountered a science fictional account of a pandemic that captured what this feels like in terms of the logic of time and space and events.

This is why I’m saying that the Spanish flu is probably the best historical reference point and its utility is also highly limited. Nothing even vaguely like this sort of spatiotemporally warping media environment existed then. That pandemic did not work the way this is.

You don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what’s going to happen, no one knows what’s going to happen, because no one is capable of comprehending what’s happening now. Try to internalize that. It’s terrifying but try.

There is no going back to normal, in part because normal never really existed to begin with except as a sort of mass hallucination but also because a world doesn’t pass through something like this without extensive scarring. We can’t go back. Don’t think we can.

Conservatives don’t understand this because conservatism clings to tradition, to the way things have been. By nature it looks back and regards the future with frightened incomprehension. That’s why they’re mostly standing in the way of doing what’s necessary.

But progressives also have trouble with this because progressivism is overly attached to a progress-focused understanding of time, as something linear that moves forward.

Time doesn’t work that way.

Bruce Sterling wrote an essay in 2010 that addressed this.

“There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history.”
wired.com/2010/02/atempo…

In 2012 I wrote an essay that used Sterling’s essay in part as a jumping-off point. I was focusing mostly on images of ruined buildings but it was also about media and stories. thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/20…

(I’m very proud of that essay.)

“We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past.” We’ve really always done that, but technology and narrative, especially image-driven narrative, intensify and rearrange it.

We create and tell stories about how the world works, that set the framework for our assumptions and what happened, what’s happening, what will happen. Those stories have never been super reliable but on the whole they’re useful.

That’s not the case anymore.

It’s impossible to overstate how disruptive the 2016 election was to this. Politics is merely one of the most ways in which that’s true but there ae many, many others and they’re more fundamental.

Now, 2016 *was* the result of old processes coming to a head.

It didn’t arrive from nowhere. It simply coalesced and erupted. But it was still a moment of breakage, a tipping point after which the perception of time and events both sped up and looped back on each other in increasingly confusing fractals.

“Time is a flat circle”. No, time is this.

Time is a fractal spiral and it’s both tightening and increasing in complexity the further we go.

What day is it? You know the name of the day, maybe, but what does that day mean? When did X happen? Last week? Last month? What was happening a year ago? I don’t know.

Donald Trump is not doing this but I think the fact that he’s a marvelously effective chaos agent and a general narrative-disrupter makes him a kind of catalyst node. But really he’s just a result of what was happening anyway.

Knowledge production and the generation of shared factual universes was always a problematic thing but now it’s breaking apart into many different spirals, diverging and colliding and creating new spirals.

It’s all a gigantic mess. It’s not without structure but because we’re embedded in the structure it’s almost impossible for us to fully apprehend it.

What does all this have to do with the pandemic?

How we engage with each other in relational space has completely altered. How we move through the world is dramatically restricted. If that hasn’t happened to you, just wait.

@GreatDismal said that the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

When we say “Italy is two weeks ahead of us” there’s something very literal about that, because Italy’s experience of the entire world has changed. The future has arrived there, in NYC, in Washington, in Detroit and New Orleans and so many other places, is rippling outward.

Time is *literally moving through space in a measurable way*. Meanwhile we communicate with each other through that shifting time in a way that further muddies the waters. We all remember the past through radically different lenses.

Malign actors with malign agendas are out there trying to mutilate everything, especially collective memories of what’s happened. Again, not new, but faster and more, and more complex.

The pandemic is another catalyst node, it’s just not so much a node as a process.

How we consume things, also. Think about how much of your life is structured by what you buy and how.

All changed.

It’s all changed. It’s all changing. People are desperately and overconfidently clinging to the old frameworks and extrapolations based on what’s already happened because we are desperate to know something, anything, but they can’t know. We can’t know.

Whatever you guess will happen, even odds you’re wrong. Whatever you think is happening, even odds you’re wrong. Whatever you think you remember, you should probably double-check. Even then, you may be wrong.

I hate that I’m saying this, because the disruption of any notion of reliable truth is exactly what groups like the Internet Research Agency are trying to do, drawing on a lot of old tricks perfected in repressive regimes.

But they didn’t really make it. They’re just using it.

I don’t recognize this world. In another couple of months I probably won’t recognize that one either, and this one will seem impossibly distant and unreal. While sharing many things.

Like I said, nothing from where I’m sitting really *looks* different.

But it is. It’s all different and it’s all changing.

Not sure what my point is, other than that. It’s all different and it’s all changing.

And also I wish I saw more people being less sure about what they think they know.

Wow. That ended up being another essay. I’m sorry about that.

Anyway, I’m going to finish watching this movie about people infecting themselves with celebrities’ viruses and then go play with my submarine.